SYDNEY MORNING HERALD journalist David Langsam stood looking at the bland red-brick block at 6 Wyargine Street. Was this really where the famous Paul Brickhill lived? From the street, it looked just two floors high. But on the harbour-side, five storeys tucked into the steep hill, with the ground floor sitting beside the golden sands of little Edwards Beach. Langsam had contacted Brickhill, requesting an interview. He would learn from the man himself that it was the fact he’d learned to fly in a Tiger Moth, as Brickhill had, that won him an invitation to the Balmoral flat. Reach for the Sky had inspired Langsam to fly, just as it’d inspired him to skip school in England to see Douglas Bader at one of his public appearances.
Climbing the concrete steps to the top-floor balcony, Langsam walked to the door to flat 53, and rang the bell. A figure appeared on the other side of the door’s rippled glass. A portly man in thongs, shorts and open shirt opened the door. His moustache was grey, his face flushed. It was April 1982, and this was Paul Brickhill, looking all of his sixty-five years. Inviting Langsam in, Brickhill ushered him past the small kitchen to a living room just large enough for a dining setting and two winged-back, fabric-covered chairs facing each other beside a large picture window.
Langsam didn’t know it, but the view from Brickhill’s flat was reminiscent of that from ‘Craig Rossie’. The beach sat immediately in front, complete with palm trees under the window. Rippling blue water extended as far as the eye could see – in this case, Middle Harbour and North Harbour stretching to Sydney’s heads, and the Tasman Sea beyond. Topless bathers lay blithely on the sand below. Yachts lazed in sheltered coves. In the distance, green-hulled Manly ferries charged through the rolling ocean swell with the urgency of corvettes on convoy duty.
Brickhill credited this view with keeping him sane. ‘If I had a unit,’ he said to Langsam, ‘say, in some side street in Gladesville or wherever, I would have gone around the twist years ago.’
Sitting in his armchair by the window, throughout their long chat Brickhill chain-smoked Summit Lights and drank Tab cola from a glass. By this time having recognised that he had a drinking problem, Brickhill no longer kept alcohol in the flat, and only drank when occasionally catching up with an old flying chum.
As Brickhill spoke quickly but quietly, skipping from one subject to another, Langsam found him conversant with current affairs. Politics, though, held little interest for Brickhill. Neither did the books of other authors. A bookshelf in the flat was lined with foreign editions of his own books in twenty languages, and a statuette of Greco-Roman god Pan presented by Pan Books for his 1956 Dam Busters million-seller.
On a coffee table lay a copy of Vogue magazine, with Brickhill’s daughter, Tempe, on the cover. After graduating from the NSW Conservatorium of Music, majoring in piano, Tempe had studied stage management at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before following her mother into modelling. There was no decoration in the flat’s main room; the walls were starkly bare, like a hospital ward, or a prison cell.
Brickhill had only given three interviews in thirteen years – to Dundy, the British TV crew and Porter. He’d treated those as duties. Relaxing with Langsam, he opened up about his life and his ‘horrors’. He confessed that even the slightest stress now floored him, and he expressed sympathy for former South Australian Premier Don Dunstan, who’d recently been diagnosed with stress disorder. Brickhill reckoned that, personally, he’d suffered a nervous breakdown in England and had never fully recovered since.
He also spoke of losing his religious faith following his divorce. ‘The requirement to believe a literal interpretation of Christian folklore turned me away from the church and filled my newfound belief with guilt,’ he confessed to Langsam.
Six years back, a book had come to him in the mail. Blueprint was a semi-religious school text with exercises on comprehension and creative writing. Brickhill never revealed who sent him the book – it may have been George Harsh, who became quite religious in his later years. Brickhill was much influenced by a poem by Sydney Carter in a section of the book that dealt with Jesus Christ. In fact, Brickhill said that it changed his life. Entitled Anonymous, Carter’s poem condemned the Christian cult of personality. The poem told Brickhill that he was not alone in holding doubts. Taking up the Bible again, he’d used his talent for research to delve into the historical realities of its contents, a task that absorbed much of his time.
As Langsam quizzed him about his youth, Brickhill spoke of his childhood stutter. As they talked, the stutter returned, on just two words: Greenwich Point, a place which had meant so much to him. Although he spoke freely about the writing of his bestsellers, Brickhill wouldn’t talk about The Deadline. As for new books, he said that for twenty-five years he’d been a literary cripple. ‘Sometimes I would have a clear day and I’d be able to write a letter. But to structure a book and get down to it – impossible.’
When Langsam asked him what he was currently working on, Brickhill said he had a book eighty per cent written, but declined to go into detail. It was the Dodge biography, which had lain untouched since the Porter article. Porter’s faith in him and the book had engendered massive self-doubt in Brickhill, and he’d set it aside to devote himself to answering his vast backlog of letters and fan mail which continued to roll in.
Yet, he told Langsam, he looked forward to completing the latest book, and was confident it would find a market. ‘I’m determined to finish the job,’ he assured the journalist. ‘Properly.’
It would take him a while, he conceded. While he reckoned his mental health was now sound, physically he was declining, with his swims and walks less frequent than before. Still, he remained upbeat as he escorted Langsam to the door. As they parted, he grinned, and, wagging the index finger of his left hand at him, reminded Langsam to confine his article to the facts: ‘Now, mind, no line-shooting. Alright?’322
Six years later, Superman actor Christopher Reeve produced and starred in The Great Escape II: The Untold Story, a fictional four-hour NBC mini-series in which Johnny Dodge returned to Germany after the war to track down those responsible for executing the Fifty. Donald Pleasence was among the cast, this time playing a Gestapo man. Initially, Brickhill encouraged and advised Reeve, but as he learned more about what he was doing with Dodge, he was horrified.
‘I fear they may use my name,’ Brickhill wrote to Dodge’s son Tony. ‘Johnny would have been mortified.’ He asked for his name to be removed from the credits.323
On the night of Tuesday, 23 April 1991, Paul Brickhill’s heart gave out. He was seventy-four years of age. By the time of his death, debilitating back pain had forced him to give up swimming and walking. A battery-powered back brace had given him some relief. He died comfortably well off, lonely and unfulfilled. He never did submit the Dodge biography for publication.
From London to New York he rated brief obituaries. London’s Times declared that he ‘set a standard in the telling of popular war stories which has never been surpassed’.324 The local press noted his passing, with only the Australian hinting at his later tormented years, headlining its obituary with ‘War Writer’s Ambition Unfulfilled’, and quoting former Sun colleague Lionel Hudson, who recalled Brickhill’s ambition to write the great Australian novel.325
Brickhill’s children became the beneficiaries of his literary estate. After graduating from the University of Sydney, son Timothy worked in the UK. Later, he settled in New Zealand, land of his birth. In the 1990s, Tempe Brickhill became chief of the London operations of Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, before moving to Paris in 2010 to become CEO of Issey Miyake Europe and a director of the prestigious Fédération Française de la Couture.